THE LEBANESE ROCKET SOCIETY

In the early 60′s, during the cold war and the apex of Pan Arabism, a group of utopian students and researchers enters the race to space and create the Lebanese Rocket Society. Sometimes, dreams can overtake a tormented history…

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s remarkable documentary The Lebanese Rocket Society was one of the recent festival highlights from the Middle East. Made with support from one of the new Gulf-based funds, it is for a first time that the work of these established and yet esoteric experimental filmmakers travelled through the global documentary circuit and played in places like London, Copenhagen, Toronto, Nyon and Buenos Aires. Seemingly dedicated to an ambitious sky rocket project that a group of Beirut-based Armenian physicists, inspired by the space exploration achievements of bigger nations, embrace but are then forced to abandon in the 1960s, the film, in fact, explores (and subtly challenges) the manipulation of collective memory and the suppression of national self-esteem in the name of a shaky and dubious Middle Eastern power balance. Forced into oblivion in the aftermath of the 1967 war, in the film the ‘rocket society’ project is brought back to life – through pictures, interviews, and in an activist-type endeavour to reconstruct and publicly transport a rocket through the streets of today’s Beirut. In the course of all this, one shrewdly raises audacious questions about ‘confiscated dreams’ and stifled aspirations. Why is it that, if you are Lebanese, you are not supposed to dream of space travel? Why double standards? Why the sky is off limits for exploration? Born in 1969 and representing the most active generation of Middle Eastern directors, Hadjithomas and Joreige speak out in discontent about paralysed ambitions and suppressed generational pride. They embrace the self-esteem and elation that the Arab Revolutions bring along. The ability of dreaming may have been impaired but it has awakened again now. It cannot be stopped across the region. ‘Maybe the fear is more inside us…Maybe we should stop being afraid?’

Dina Iordanova (excerpt from her Introduction to Film Festivals and the Middle East (2014))